[HN Gopher] Creative Fansubbing Techniques: Part 2
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Creative Fansubbing Techniques: Part 2
Author : TheAceOfHearts
Score : 89 points
Date : 2025-03-11 07:48 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.md-subs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.md-subs.com)
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Well this brings back some old memories :)
|
| We built our own KLT point tracker to make "Onscreen Text
| Substitution" stick to moving cars and/or during camera pans.
|
| We reverse engineered Winny (a Windows-only filesharing software)
| to build a Linux server with WebUI so that you could conveniently
| remote-control a server in Japan.
|
| We built a C-like language with AOT compiler that actually
| creates machine code to make particle effects render faster.
|
| We used spectrogram analysis to assist with separating the audio
| track for along karaoke animations.
|
| And of course there was multiple competing xdcc servers.
|
| And then there was the truly crazy stuff like a TSR bootloader
| for your PS2 which would hook drawing calls in memory so that you
| can fan-translate video games, too.
|
| We truly had an insane amount of cutting-edge tech back then, if
| you consider that this was just some people's hobby to enjoy
| Japanese content.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I think I came onto the scene probably 5 years after you did.
| Ours was the Share and Perfect Dark era :)
| creamyhorror wrote:
| Many computer nerds among anime enjoyers.
| quink wrote:
| Wonderful to see Flip Flappers have that bit of over-
| representation that it so richly deserves. It's a true work of
| love, so it's not surprising to see fansubs of it reflect that as
| well.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Never expected to hear about that series on HN lol
| dsign wrote:
| Judging by fan adoration, I get this feeling that anime in Japan
| are not made by ginormous animation companies trying too hard to
| produce the same samey conformant goop as everybody else, which
| seems to be a problem that EE.UU. and Europe do have. Or am I
| wrong?
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| You're probably only being exposed to the best and most notable
| anime, which is giving you a very skewed perspective. In fact
| every season (anime releases follow a seasonal pattern; Winter,
| Spring, Summer, Fall) there's tons of same-y and uninteresting
| trope-filled anime. Most seasonal anime just takes some basic
| premise as a starting point and then it fills in the rest of
| the details with tons of tropes, or it copies the key details
| from other successful entries in the sub-genre. If you started
| following every anime season you'd quickly notice how many
| derivative anime are released each season.
|
| You can check it out for yourself, go to anilist.co, and filter
| for Year 2024, and then filter again for each Season. There's
| tons of fad-chasing, aside from the major standouts. It's
| honestly a shame because some of these slop-tier anime still
| tend to get beautiful animations, but their stories and writing
| in general is really bad. Sometimes you get an F-tier story
| with S-tier animation.
| quink wrote:
| > you'd quickly notice how many derivative anime are released
| each season.
|
| Never could get used to the term 'derivative' in that
| context. Everything's derivative. Hard to know what word to
| use instead, but I just wouldn't attach an adjective in the
| first place and just skip past it. For instance, I don't call
| a particular reality show derivative, I'm just not really
| going to be interested in the first place, odds are.
| dharmab wrote:
| The most popular new show of the year is anything _but_
| derivative (DanDaDan)
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| > the main heroine is a roastie
|
| Not sure if want.
| apt-get wrote:
| Otaku/doujin culture, and the creative industry that rose
| around it in Japan, is as good as it gets when it comes to
| finding good ideas and propping them up. Basically anyone who
| can draw can release their own manga/webnovel/illustrations on
| pixiv, twitter, and others, get a couple volumes out with this
| or that publishing house, see where it goes and whether the
| public catches on. Self-publishing plays a huge part in this,
| whether it's doujinshi (self-made [often derivative] books sold
| at conventions like Comiket, Comitia, or online, with a
| substantial proportion of r-18 [but not only] content), doujin
| music albums, indie games and visual novels, etc.
|
| Funding for anime adaptations is plentiful, and fan support
| helps bridge the confidence gap where production committees
| (consortiums of multiple publishing/IP companies pooling the
| money to distribute the risk) won't go for more indie /
| experimental works. Profit is recouped on developing the brand
| and merch, while leaving plenty of room for directors and
| studios to establish their own auteur identity. Studios are
| getting leaner and more focused these days, splitting off into
| smaller entities kicked off with a project or two with more
| margin for talent to shine.
|
| It's not all perfect, though. Freelance work and lack of
| mentoring has really put a dent into the supply of new
| animators, who lack job security and often swing between
| studios left and right, but there are industry efforts to fix
| this and preserve knowledge, with the oldest pioneer animators
| now starting to hit their 60's and 70's.
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| Please explain how "funding is plentiful" for the industry -
| as an American Musician and artist, I am truly curious how
| money is available to creatives in Japan in this sector.
| Thank you!
| apt-get wrote:
| Sakugabooru's blog has much information on the internals of
| anime production. This article answers some questions about
| the production committee model:
| https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2017/05/02/what-is-an-animes-
| pr...
| astrange wrote:
| It's plentiful in PPP terms I suppose. Japanese wages are
| very low, they wouldn't be able to fund even one of those
| ugly Netflix adult comedies where it's made in Flash and
| called Big Balls or something.
| protocolture wrote:
| No you would not be correct. In fact the explosion of certain
| genres of anime have been extremely cookie cutter.
|
| Thats not to take away the enormous contribution made by
| fansubbers. Some of them are absolutely amazing. I remember
| seeing some of these techniques used in School Rumble years
| ago, and they also went out of their way to translate visual
| puns for western audiences.
| astrange wrote:
| There's a quality filter over it because people don't want to
| translate all the slop. In particular Kadokawa has seemingly
| replaced half the industry with bad "isekai" fantasy novel
| adaptations.
|
| But there's also several long running toy commercial series for
| kids like Pretty Cure. They're better than any other country's
| toy commercials but still that.
| Daiz wrote:
| As someone who's done made use of most of the techniques listed
| in these posts, some comments...
|
| First of all, it's nice to see them receive attention outside the
| fansubbing scene! Anime has long made use of on-screen text in
| ways that most other mediums don't, and with the limited
| animation the medium is famous for, it tends to be extremely
| amenable to localization that aims to replicate that on-screen
| text presentation as closely as possible. With fansubbing, this
| is largely due to the power of the ASS (Advanced SubStation
| Alpha) subtitle format, and the Aegisub editor's capabilities for
| making use of that power (none of which is a coincidence - ASS
| was effectively developed for subtitling anime, and the same goes
| for Aegisub). Of special note is Aegisub's Automation features,
| which allow users to write Lua scripts to extend its
| capabilities, even building various extra GUI bits and bobs to
| make them usable for any non-coders.
|
| To comment on one of the techniques in particular: it's always
| kind of fun to see people be impressed by masking, because
| technically speaking it's one of the more simple tricks that
| people do with ASS. The format includes basic vector drawing
| capabilities, which can be used to also make clipping masks for
| subtitles. How masking works is that usually the typesetter will
| be simply drawing vector clipping masks to clip the subtitles
| properly, frame-by-frame. Due to the limited animation, this
| usually doesn't take all that long. If the covering object
| remains static in shape, you could also just draw the mask once
| and then use motion tracking and an automation script to move it
| for the duration of the masked line. So all in all, not very
| complex, just a bunch of manual effort :)
|
| And speaking of which: one of the biggest innovations of anime
| fansubbing happened around 2011-2012, when fansub groups started
| making use of motion tracking en masse. The popular program for
| doing the actual motion tracking was Mocha[1], and then various
| tools were used to apply its After Effects -compatible motion
| tracking data to typesetting lines in Aegisub. This development
| eventually culminated in Aegisub-Motion[2], which has been the
| de-facto motion tracking script for Aegisub for quite a while.
|
| Motion tracking is also the main thing still lacking when it
| comes to typesetting in official anime releases today. This
| mostly comes down to the fact that while fansubs can have fancy
| motion tracked typesetting completely softsubbed since they
| expect their releases to be watched on reasonably powerful PCs,
| the same doesn't really apply to the much more limited and less
| powerful subtitle render used by official services. But honestly
| speaking? That's mostly just an excuse for the official services
| to not even try. You could have the fanciest on-screen text
| presentation in the world if you just burned your on-screen text
| translations into the video (hardsubbing, as opposed to
| softsubbing). Yes, this approach would work just fine even for
| multiple languages - modern video streaming is already based on
| short segmented chunks, so all you'd need to do is develop a
| system that will make multiple hardsubbed variants of only the
| segments where on-screen text is actually present. With this, for
| the vast majority of video, you would only need one variant. I
| developed the bones of a system like this myself for some
| official anime streaming I worked on some years back
| (unfortunately no longer available), and it very much was
| extremely feasible. This kind of segmented hardsubbing is even
| possible on Blu-ray, so the technique is disc-feasible too.
|
| In conclusion, I completely, 100%, concur that I'd love to see a
| lot of these techniques be used with official anime releases.
| Especially since it would be very much possible to apply just
| about all of them as long as a publisher was simply motivated
| enough to make it happen.
|
| [1] https://borisfx.com/products/mocha-pro/
|
| [2] https://github.com/TypesettingTools/Aegisub-Motion
| slackfan wrote:
| Oh shi- why I am not surprised to see Daiz on HN.
|
| The irony is that in older official releases in the VHS era
| we'd get that sort of effort towards localization, but the
| purists really hated it.
|
| I had a prototype setup worked out for video that actually did
| convert ASS -> video stream that you could overlay on top a
| number of years back, but never took that anywhere.
| creamyhorror wrote:
| Hiya Daiz, hope you're doing well after all these years
| doright wrote:
| OMG it's Flip Flappers. Watch Flip Flappers.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I saw it years ago with my ex and liked it but I can't remember
| what it's about (well it's two girls fighting evil but) and
| never ended up rewatching it
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| This needs proper citations for the episodes used as examples.
| looperhacks wrote:
| I can't give you the exact episodes, but the series:
|
| Blurry Text For Fuzzy Hearing: Dimension W Fading Text For Fade
| Transition: Made in Abyss Reflected Text On Reflecting
| Surfaces: Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid Onscreen Text Imitation:
| First Flip Flappers, then KonoSuba Onscreen Text Substitution:
| First Flip Flappers, then Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid Subtitle
| Text Distortion: Again, Flip Flappers Karaoke: Flip Flappers
| Masking: Alice & Zoroku
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| Thanks! That's some more for my watchlist.
| qiqitori wrote:
| Used to do this kind of stuff (a long long time ago), first in
| ASS and later in After Effects. After Effects was real fun! Put
| in a lot of effort into making signs look the same as the
| original Japanese.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I recently watched a terrible anime where a girl got thrown out
| of a building for some reason.
|
| I don't remember anything about the anime except that the
| subtitles spun end over end and flew off the screen in perfect
| sync with the girl. It was beautiful and probably the best thing
| about the series if all I can remember from it is that one sub.
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